November 7, 2009 • 7:20 pm 0
I rarely try out a new site without being highly conscious of my own user experience. That’s what happens when you’ve been in startup Lala Land for a few years, write for a tech blog, and are married to a UI design expert.
Read my post Online seduction on frogblog, about being a conscious user (but mostly about how I was seduced by Squiz, and their anti-business cards).
Filed under: apps, web life , Francophilia, fun, grrls, IRL, personal branding, toys
October 27, 2009 • 9:59 am 0
Why am I always so shocked when I meet people who, for example, don’t know what Twitter is? (And this happened the other day in Paris, not the Amazon rainforest…) Sometimes we Internet types need a reality check.
Here’s a post I wrote for Web Worker Daily just as a reminder that there are lots of people who live mostly in the brick & mortar universe. There are more of them, in fact, than there are of us:
Filed under: web life, web trends
October 20, 2009 • 8:25 am 0
I admit I’m compulsive and neurotic about some things. Like recycling. I recycle everything, even the little paper envelopes my teabags come in. (And then agonize about what tea plantations have done to developing countries, the carbon emissions to ship the tea, the fact that so many resources go into creating something that is essentially a non-food. Although it does have anti-oxidants. Then I vow to quit. Almost every day.). You see what I mean by neurotic?
Anyway, I wrote a couple of green-leaning posts for Web Worker Daily recently that I thought I’d share:
Filed under: web life
August 29, 2009 • 12:51 pm 0
Everybody seems to have at least two cents to contribute to the apparently endless discussion of online identity (or personal branding, or e-reputation, or whatever you want to call it). I have plenty to say about it too; I even give talks on the topic. And since personal branding was the theme on Web Worker Daily last month, I contributed two articles that you might find interesting. Or not. But I do talk about Big Bird and pastries in an attempt to keep you from being too bored…
Filed under: social media, web life, web trends , online identity, personal branding
August 15, 2009 • 8:51 am 3
Everybody who knows me knows I’m a champion of French startups: on my own blogs, on Web Worker Daily, and IRL. But I’m on the verge of being really pissed off. There’s a French startup that owes me around 300 Euros for a translation I did, and they’re six months late paying…
The merde is about to hit the ventilateur.
Filed under: social media, translation, web life , funding, startuppity
July 27, 2009 • 3:09 pm 0
…I’ve spent a few years with my finger on the racing pulse of the Web and I’ll tell you what. There’s a whole lot of crap out there. There are so many utterly ridiculous concepts that have managed to find programmers and investors, so many brain-wasters helping to speed along the decline and fall of Western civilization… We could be doing so much better. It can get depressing sometimes. But the reality is just this, and it will never change:
Filed under: social media, web life, web trends , Francophilia, startuppity
July 13, 2009 • 6:44 am 3
This week I’m launching an e-commerce site to accompany Francophilia, the social network for francophiles I founded. It’s running on the Zlio platform. It has some limitations, but I’m pretty happy to be able to offer my francophile members one-stop shopping for French and French-themed products!
Just found out my personal blog, frogblog, is ranked 42 of all blogs in the “France” category according to invesp consulting. And I’m in some pretty good company! But you know what they say about stats.
Got my blogging pass for LeWeb ‘09. I’ll be there for Web Worker Daily again this year. I discovered some exciting startups to write about there in ‘08.
I have a new dog. Well, actually, he’s a “used” dog. I even wrote about one of the reasons why someone with my lifestyle should get a dog on Web Worker Daily the other day. It was published on the day I got him from the shelter! His name is Wiley. But we also call him Firefox because he looks like a fox. And, of course, we are Firefox fans.
I got an iPhone! Like Wiley, it’s used — Vincent gave me his 2G when he got a 3GS. I spent Saturday morning playing with it in bed…
Filed under: social media, tech events, web life , blogging, Francophilia, Geeks In Love, toys
June 21, 2009 • 8:39 am 0
It was sheer delight translating Claire Ulrich’s article Les Censeurs du Net, originally published in Le Monde 2.
In Internet history, 1994-2004 was the era of the pioneers. 2004-2007 was the era of the merchants. Now we’re entering the era of the bullies. Everywhere in the world, sites are going dark, arrests are increasing, more people are going to prison. The Web just celebrated its 20th birthday. Nobody used to take it seriously, but those days are gone. Read the rest…
Almost as much fun as translating her lyrical Plus belle, ma vie en ligne for Kiva (not available on line, but I will send you a PDF if you wish).
Filed under: language, translation, web trends
June 19, 2009 • 7:02 am 1
It started with Springwise, which I subscribe to to see what’s hot out of the entrepreneurial oven. It’s always a refreshing read because it’s not only – or even mostly – about Internet startups and the latest Twitter app. You’d be amazed at how many great ideas and insights you can get reading about non-Web innovation…
Springwise occasionally covers Web startups that are truly special, and YourTour.com is one of them.
Filed under: apps , Francophilia, startuppity, tools, toys
June 7, 2009 • 9:50 am 1
Every startup founder dreams of changing the world and/or striking it rich. And everything Internet-related seems to happen so fast that you can be easily fooled into believing that your startup has to be an overnight sensation in order to be considered worthwhile. It does work that way for some people. But most of us have to work really hard for a long time, during which we suffer deeply from user envy. I mean, Facebook gets over half a million new users a day! Nothing like somebody else’s huge stats to make you feel horribly inadequate…
We all have days when we get demoralized and depressed and consider giving it all up for a day job.
If you’re suffering from the startup blues, here’s some good medicine for you that’ll put an end to your user envy…
Filed under: web life , startuppity, tips
May 20, 2009 • 11:37 am 0
I recently found a new BFF in the form of Doris, the task-management app that has become indispensable to me for managing all of my miscellaneous professional and personal tasks.
If you have yet to get a handle on the chaos, read this series of articles on my quest for the perfect task management app!
I also wrote about Doris on this blog here.
May 16, 2009 • 12:38 pm 0
Or when you’re a freelancer wearing lots of hats and you’re trying to launch a startup too, you get to be good at that 21st-century sport, extreme juggling.
This is a day in my life. Read about how I deal with it on Web Worker Daily and CNNMoney.com/Fortune.
May 12, 2009 • 3:13 pm 0
Google is messing with my reality and that is simply unacceptable. A while back I noticed that, more and more often, my searches were returning a lot of junk that was unrelated to what I was looking for. I have concluded that Google thinks I’m an infant. Or a moron.
Filed under: apps, language, translation, web life , tools
April 30, 2009 • 6:22 am 0
Mark Morford on Facebook:
Old girlfriends, lost loves, long-forgotten friends, high school sweethearts, band mates, roommates, old nemeses, lots of former cheerleaders turned born-again Christian megamoms, and everything in between. All those old connections, those lives and chapters and periods of my life I thought I’d left behind so cleanly, so decisively, way back when? Here they all are again, like a living scrapbook, constantly renewing and updating itself. What a thing.
From: The vampires of Facebook: Could it actually be dangerous to connect with everyone you ever knew?
Filed under: social media, web life , online identity
April 27, 2009 • 7:49 am 0
This is not a ladies luncheon, girls. No cucumber sandwiches. Instead, the Women Who Tech 2009 TeleSummit offers a dozen different panels on hot topics moderated by women who know what they’re talking about (from SlideShare, BlogHer, YouTube, MoveOn and more). Panels include Launching Your Own Startup, Social Networks and Diversity Barriers, and Innovation and Tech Career Reinvention. $10 per panel. I’ll “see” you there!
Filed under: social media, tech events , grrls, startuppity
